[HN Gopher] Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words ... ___________________________________________________________________ Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words we hear Author : hhs Score : 96 points Date : 2022-11-07 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nyu.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nyu.edu) | makz wrote: | Probably related, I'm not an native English speaker, and I have | noticed that sometimes I don't understand what someone is telling | me in this language , just one or two words, and it kind of gets | saved on a buffer in my mind and they keep talking and after a | few seconds what was in the buffer gets "processed" and I | understand it at the same time that whatever is being said to me | currently. It feels weird. | 1-more wrote: | I had this years later from The Simpsons of all things. In "Who | Shot Mr. Burns (Part 2)" Tito Puente has a musical number | "Senor Burns"[0] where the singer calls Burns "el diablo con | dinero" which I remembered the sound of but not the meaning | until I learned some Spanish like 10 years later. | | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kdDet7G14 | ianmcgowan wrote: | This is something that also happens as you age - even if your | hearing remains decent, Central Auditory Processing Disorder | becomes an issue. I imagine it will be more pronounced with a | second language, so you have to look forward to. | | https://www.rehab.research.va.gov/jour/05/42/4suppl2/martin.... | russdill wrote: | I have an oddly similar sensation when becoming aware of a | sound that woke me. | ncpa-cpl wrote: | I've had this happen in places were multiple languages are | spoken. | | Hearing something in Language B, but not realizing, so the | brain processes it in Language A. Then not being able to | understand for a few seconds until the brain realizes that what | I heard is actually Language B, and suddenly the first seconds | of the speech make sense. | w_for_wumbo wrote: | I'm a native English speaker and I have the same thing, where | someone will say something I don't understand, and then in the | middle of asking what they mean, I realise what they were | trying to say (The processing just took longer than I expected) | lilyball wrote: | > _The researchers found that the brain processes speech using a | buffer_ | | This is not news to anyone with ADHD who regularly says "what?" | before immediately figuring out what was already said and | responding to it. It feels exactly like reprocessing an existing | auditory buffer. | mad44 wrote: | Is this a specific thing to ADHD? I do this a lot, and I am | ADD, but I thought this is a common thing. | modeless wrote: | I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the connection to AI. Many | models need "positional encodings" as part of their input in | order to to understand the spatial or temporal relationship | between different input tokens. It's not at all surprising to me | that the brain would have an equivalent. | | It's not always clear what form these encodings should take. If | we could figure out the actual encodings used by the brain, I bet | we would find that they have big advantages over the ones we're | currently using. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | We hugely underestimate how _processed_ all of our senses are. | | Hearing doesn't listen to pressure waves. It does some very | complex real time source separation to distinguish between | different sound sources. | | Then it performs overtone and resonance matching to identify | different speakers. | | Then it follows up with phoneme recognition to identify words - | which somehow identifies phoneme invariants across a wide range | of voice types, including kids, male/female, local/foreign and | social register(class)/accent. | | Then it recognises emotional cues from intonation, which again | are invariant across a huge range of sources. | | And then finally its labels all of that as linguistic metadata, | converts the phonemes into words, and parses the word | combinations. | | It's not until you try to listen to a foreign language that you | hear the almost unprocessed audio for what it is. And even that | still has elements of accent and intonation recognition. | jesusofnazarath wrote: | jvm___ wrote: | And, if it's your native language, you can't help but process | it. | | This is why I like talking to 4-year-olds, they see the world | as it truely is, and can communicate it back out. They don't | have all the conditioned learning the rest of us have, but can | see a clearer picture without bias. | antiterra wrote: | I've heard garbled words over a bad connection that I didn't | understand, only to have my brain parse them seconds later | without intentional effort. It makes me wonder, is the language | center processing the memorized version of sound here or is it | reprocessing at the lower level? | SllX wrote: | This is basically an everyday experience for me, and not | limited to telephone calls. My hearing is not great, and I'll | often ask someone to repeat something only to finally finish | parsing it about a second after I asked because in the | intervening time my brain reconstructed a signal from a bunch | of noise. | UniverseHacker wrote: | Fascinating... this happens to me a lot also, but I never | really realized what I was experiencing until reading your | comment. Later on I will feel guilty asking people to | repeat things when I actually understood them. I never | considered what you are saying, that I didn't yet have the | information when I asked them, but later did. | | I often wonder if my hearing is poor, or if I am just | overly sensitive to the possibility of mis-hearing people, | that I would rather err on the side of confusion. I | overhear a lot of other people talking that I can tell | misunderstand each other, but neither are aware, and I | wouldn't want to do that. | foobazgt wrote: | I've had the same experience my entire life. That said, | testing shows my hearing isn't great, but it's not horrible | either. I even have an exceptional ability to identify | actors solely by their voice when others can't identify | them at all. I've often wondered if there is something else | going on that runs deeper than just surface level | "hearing". Like I'm hearing slower but more deeply. | SllX wrote: | I don't know if I'm hearing more deeply, but basically | the same experience: failed every hearing test I ever | took but I'm not deaf either. Just need to rely more on | post-processing than others, and the best I've been able | to figure is I didn't get enough socialization at | critical points of my early development, which is true, I | just can't prove that it's also related to my hearing. | kridsdale2 wrote: | Non linguistic elements of verbal communication are so | universal nobody even really notices when fictional alien | species in media communicate to human protagonists. It's | noncontroversial to the audience that hostile/non-hostile, | instruction, friendliness, cooperation, etc, are all embedded | in the tones of all animals, robots, and even tree creatures | throughout the universe. | henrydark wrote: | This isn't surprising given that it's well known that we | share more than 90% of our DNA with tree creatures across the | universe | mahathu wrote: | >And then finally its labels all of that as linguistic | metadata, converts the phonemes into words, and parses the word | combinations. | | How did the scientific studies show this? | tibbydudeza wrote: | It implies a single buffer so there is a delay in cognition which | implies our consciousness is always lagging behind physical | reality. | notacoward wrote: | Similar things happen with vision BTW. When you start looking | into it, what our eyes and ears and the connected parts of the | brain actually do is pretty crazy. Our sensory systems are | eventually consistent, and there _are_ glitches, but amazingly it | all mostly works. | codeulike wrote: | _When you start looking into it_ | notacoward wrote: | Ha! I wish I could say that was intentional. Thanks for | pointing it out. | w_for_wumbo wrote: | Essentially our hardware isn't perfect, and there's delays so | the software has a bunch of patches and workarounds to | interpolate what it believes is occurring, which happens to be | right a lot of the time. Normally only with illusions where | this reality is confronted to us. | ChrisClark wrote: | I think it could be almost described as a full on 3D rendering | engine, we are getting the raw data from outside ourselves, but | what we see is completely built up inside our own minds. Does | that make sense? | tornato7 wrote: | I like that. We are always processing information in 3D, not | just vision but you can imagine hearing someone behind you | and your brain immediately places them in 3D space based on | your prior knowledge of your surroundings. | | It's amazing sensor fusion because you can | see/hear/smell/touch something all at the same time and | associate it correctly with one object. | kridsdale2 wrote: | It's much much more like our new AI image generators than a | physical simulation of light and volume with mathematical | precision. Imagination is a "good enough" fluctuation of | seemingly random stimulation of neurons that we're able to | judge as being quite approximate to the same stimulation | pattern that we get from our physical sensors. Thinking about | a scene or music and "hearing it" is like a unit test. | notakio wrote: | It has been illuminating for me over the past few weeks to | have lost hearing in my right ear as a result of a lingering | sinus infection; I understood that identifying the direction | a sound might come from would be difficult with only one ear, | but I had no idea how crucial it was for speech | comprehension, particularly when any other noise is also | present. | | I've found that I can barely even discern that speech is | present within a mix of noises, much less am I able to | comprehend the speech until such time as I can reduce the | other noises to a minimal level, and directionally point my | ear at the source of said speech. Conference calls were quite | a delight there for a while. | drcongo wrote: | There was an excellent PBS show called The Brain with Dr David | Eagleman which, in one episode, went into detail on the way the | brain re-syncs what it sees with what it hears, essentially doing | a tiny bit of time travelling to ensure that your world makes | sense. It's well worth seeking out. | spideymans wrote: | I couldn't find the show, but he has a related lecture on | YouTube | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_e99qbJ4U | jvm___ wrote: | Is this why we turn down the car volume when looking for a | house number? The resync process is taking too much bandwidth, | or messing with our visual/temporal system, so reducing the | audio input helps the system. | smeej wrote: | I'm sure I'm missing some important nuance or something, but it | sounds like what they're saying is, "You can understand spoken | words because your brain processes the sounds in the order you | hear them." | | This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world to me. | _Everything_ about me experiences time sequentially. If I | remember things, I can cast my mind back in time, but I still | remember things from beginning to end, not in some other order. | | I'd have assumed my brain processes my visual inputs sequentially | too. I can't even think what other option there might be. Somehow | everything I've seen or heard over some set period of time hits | me all at once? | | What am I missing here? | LocalH wrote: | > Everything about me experiences time sequentially. | | That's not entirely true. Ever look at a clock with a second | hand and see the hand linger a little longer the first second? | Congratulations, you just saw things out of order. Your brain | did not receive input for the period of time when your eyes | were in motion towards the clock, so it lied to you and filled | in the missing data _after the fact_ once it started getting | visual input again. | codeulike wrote: | There's an interesting sortof thought-trap when thinking about | these things - which this article doesn't fall into - but I'll | mention it anyway cos its fun. Dennett calls it the Cartesian | Theatre - and the idea is that when thinking about how the brain | works, we may mistakenly imagine that once the brain has (say) | processed these timestamped sounds, it then puts them all back | together somewhere to 'play them back' to our consciousness. But | thats a paradox because then you'd need another consciousness to | interpret the reconstructed sound. Dennett likened it to | imagining a little homunculus inside your brain that is watching | a screen that plays back your conscious exprience. Of course it | can't work like that, because it becomes recursive. | | So when the brain 'time stamps' these sounds (as they put it) it | (probably) doesn't then need to ever put them back in the right | order again. That bit of processing is done. A corollary to this | idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the | brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back | 'together'. That also means there is no one instant in time where | we become 'conscious' of things. If its spread throughout the | brain is must necessarily be smeared across a (fairly short) | internal of time too. | | I think these days with neural nets being better understood | perhaps we dont fall into this thought trap so much. | coldtea wrote: | > _So when the brain 'time stamps' these sounds (as they put | it) it (probably) doesn't then need to ever put them back in | the right order again. That bit of processing is done._ | | I'm not sure I buy it. It wont have a "homunculus", but it | could very well have a pipeline of autonomous processing | centers, where the second part needs to have them in order. | | uniq is not a homunculus here either, but still needs its input | in order: cut -d, -f1 xxx.csv | sort | uniq | | wc -l | | (yeah, uniq is not needed here, but that's not the point) | retrac wrote: | > A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most | likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' | where things come back 'together'. That also means there is no | one instant in time where we become 'conscious' of things. | | People can start acting with seemingly-conscious intent before | they consciously become aware of the action. This delay can be | quite a few seconds. Under ideal conditions with brain imaging, | it's possible to guess some time what a person will do before | they announce their own awareness of their intent (e.g. press | one of two buttons). | | I've had hints of this experience subjectively, from time to | time. Action, then thought, in that order. I'd like a sip of | water; with particularly careful awareness of relative | sequencing, I'm fairly sure that, sometimes, when this thought | percolates to the surface of my mind, my hand is already moving | towards the glass. | | Sometimes I wonder if the conscious self is mostly just a | passive observer, constantly coming up with post-hoc | rationalizations to explain why the body just acted the way it | did. Decidedly unnerving, but that seems to be the nature of | our being. | | Multiple loci of consciousness is, IMO, fairly strongly | supported by what happens with brain damage. Very rarely, | people with damage to the corpus callosum linking the | hemispheres of the brain, develop something like alien hand | syndrome, where half of their body adopts complex and | seemingly-intentional behaviour, that the person is quite | unaware of consciously. This manifestation is sometimes | described as having a personality and desires, which are often | similar, but not identical, to the conscious part of that | person. | tudorw wrote: | https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/fulltext/9900/consci. | .. | pessimizer wrote: | People can act with "seemingly-conscious" intent without | _ever_ becoming "consciously" aware of the action. Eric | Schwitzgebel wrote a lot about this; one of my favorites of | his is _How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The | Case of Human Echolocation_. | | https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm | cecilpl2 wrote: | There is an excellent (very) short story by Ted Chiang called | "What's expected of us" that I think you'll like. | | https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a | Filligree wrote: | It's something, alright. I just find it a little... | strange. | | Compatibilism isn't a new invention, and Chiang ought to | have heard of it, but it isn't mentioned at all in the | story. | qbit wrote: | Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this | part: | | "Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my | sending this warning won't alter those proportions." | | Of course sending the warning will have an effect because | it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read | it! They don't get to _choose_ how they will be affected by | it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a | person has no free will is not to say that they are not | affected by their environment. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | > _Of course sending the warning will have an effect_ | | Compared to not sending it? Of course - but that's a | counterfactual. The present leads to the future, where | this message is sent; the act of sending the message did | not alter the past. | officialjunk wrote: | by this logic, with humans having millions of neurons in other | parts of the body, such as the gut, we may have consciousness | spread out over the body, not just the brain. | [deleted] | coldtea wrote: | Not sure about consciousness, but some of its processing is a | given, the gut is even called a "second brain" by scientists | in related fields. | cscheid wrote: | Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who's done work in the | area, and has decent popsci books about this idea. I read the | older ones, "Descartes' Error" and "The Feeling of What | Happens", and they're fun, good reads. Apparently he's | written more on the subject as well. | ianmcgowan wrote: | Perhaps there's a reason for the cliches - "go with your | gut", "what is your gut telling you?". It's pretty common to | feel like some emotions (anxiety, excitement, shame) are | radiating from the gut. Maybe there is actually a | physiological link for certain base emotions? | practice9 wrote: | It's common for meditation practitioners to relax their | body (relax tense muscles) in order to gain access to | calmer states of mind | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Dennett is making a (naive) philosophical point about the | nature of consciousness, not a linquistic point about the | nature of language perception. | | You don't need a Cartesian Theatre, or even strict reassembly. | I'd expect something more like a hierarchical/nested structure | of template recognition for common word sequences and sentence | structures. | | Brains notice certainly when out of order are words. But brains | can still make sense of them - with some extra effort - as long | as there's still some templated structure left to work with. | | You need to randomise much longer sequences before the | templating breaks down. | | None of this says anything relevant about what consciousness | may or may not be. It's still the same old problem of qualia, | only now it's about qualia that are perceived as linguistic and | conceptual relationships, not trivial perceptual | identifications. ("Dog", "orange", "philosopher", etc.) | [deleted] | thedudeabides5 wrote: | This is why (unmentioned company) runs on timeseries. | Sommer wrote: | This reminds me of the correlogram modeling of auditory | perception where the cochlea uses autocorrelation to encode | temporal information of a sound signal. A neat idea that helps | describe a lot of time encoded auditory processes. | | Short explanation: | https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~malcolm/correlograms/index.html?... | [stanford.edu] | jrnichols wrote: | The more we understand this, the more others will finally | understand why "just wear a mask, it's so simple" was extremely | ableist and discriminatory for some of us to hear for the past 2 | years. | sebringj wrote: | That seems so efficient to do it all at once like that. The brain | seems to be this massively parallel/buffered biological machine | with an assembly pipeline to the consciousness center(s)? Like a | mix of specific architecture layout (software 1.0) with a bunch | of pattern matchers (software 2.0) maybe but I'm complete layman | here obviously. | aix1 wrote: | I wonder if Auditory Processing Disorder could be related to this | mechanism. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder | BWStearns wrote: | I wonder if this is part of why it's nearly impossible to form | sentences when you hear an echo of your own voice on zoom or | something, like your brain perceives it as a duplicate chunk that | was mis-timestamped. | kraquepype wrote: | I do wonder myself if there is some research on this, it is | irrationally annoying when I hear an echo of myself while | talking, so much so that I just can't proceed, it would be nice | to know why that is. | pessimizer wrote: | Look at research on stutters. There are treatments for | stutter that involve replaying one's own voice back to them | with a delay. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_Auditory_Feedback | anon291 wrote: | Reminds me of positional encoding in attention based networks. | johntb86 wrote: | I was thinking that too, but this description makes it seem | more like a type of windowing rather than the position encoding | in a transformer (which is fixed): "the information [...] gets | passed between different neural populations in a predictable | way, which serves to time-stamp each sound with its relative | order." ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-07 23:00 UTC)